Sibme

Works well with struggling teachers

Pros:

This software works well when trying to develop struggling teachers. It allows you to give them feedback from actual lessons with the chance for them to see themselves. True growth can occur when used correctly.

Cons:

Its a little hard to configure in the beginning but smooth after you play with it for a while...

Sibme

Pros:

Sibme allows me to provide a space to collaborate with teachers through discussions, shared resources, and video reflection.

Cons:

There are many features that can be utilized through Sibme that make coaching effective and collaborative. Sometimes the links to Google documents when uploaded don't allow you to use it as a live document.

Strong Mission and Responsive Staff, but Glitchy Product

Comments: It's a promising platform that has helped us unlock sharing potential in our organization. However, it feels on shaky technological ground for the ways our team uses it. As the administration liaison, I spend too much time putting out small fires and trying to understand what is a Sibme issue versus something a team member is doing wrong.

Pros:

The core features are usually solid and intuitive to new users - adding team members, uploading and commenting on videos. As an education leadership coaching organization with over 50 coaches, we have used Sibme to help our coaches re-watch and improve upon their own practices by letting development conversations be grounded in real examples of their work. Plus, other non-coaching staff now have an easy window into coaching without pestering coaches! In our COVID virtual coaching environment, grounding org learning in video sharing was invaluable. It saves everyone time and the collaboration features to enhance this org learning (commenting, sharing, tagging pre-set categories) are easy to use.

Cons:

Though the core service is solid, I encounter tech glitches and question marks at a frustratingly high rate. It's small things - user permission mismatch across pages, confusing naming conventions (the account wide "Admin-User-Viewer" and Huddle-level "Admin-Member-Viewer" have very similar names but different meanings, which is confusing), audio issues for uploads, and several areas of confusion or disconnect in the new Zoom-Sibme "Conference" integration. This latter piece would have been excellent to use in the COVID virtual coaching environment, but was troublesome enough that our team never meaningfully used the integration. More robust and coherent help guides on the Zoom-Sibme integration (with video!) would be a good start. Our customer service manager is very responsive and solutions-oriented and I'm grateful for her! But technical solutions seem slow and often incomplete.

Moving the Needle on Evidence-Based Design

Comments: I discover something new that I can do with sent me all the time. I would use it in every part of my work ff I could. It feels personal, safe, accessible, and productive.

Pros:

I like the fact that send me offers privacy for formative learning. I like that in a great school setting with evidence. I like that it pairs common technological components like video with reflection.

Cons:

As a comprehensive system in a space, that is a bit of a paradigm shift in education (evidence-based coaching), folks often find it a bit overwhelming. To say that it’s the technology or the paradigm shift that’s overwhelming is hard to say.

Video mentoring

Comments: Excellent

Pros:

Being able to connect the TCEs and my comments at the actual time during the classroom video visit, allows my interns and student teachers to comprehend exactly what was seen. This allows valuable discussions and a great resource for beginning teachers.

Cons:

My students have had difficulty with uploading videos onto the Sibme platform.